0 first nor easter of 2014. we re standing right here where the crews in the city are busy trying to clear the snow off the sidewalks. we re told there s about 5 or 6 inches of snow in central park this morning. as you can see, more is falling. get this, in parts of massachusetts it has been hit hard. they ve got more than 20 inches of snow already. check out the map. you can see where the storm is right now. we ll follow it all morning long. every major city in the northeast is covered. that has forced cancellation of classes at schools across the region. kids are screaming in joy this morning. not everyone, though. this is the long island expressway which is normally one of the busiest highways in the country, packed any time of day or night. right now it is completely empty. the state of new york shut this road down and other major arteries as well. i have to tell you, the roads are not the only problem. today alone, about 1,500 flights have been canceled in addition to the thousa
march 23, 2010 at the signing ceremony for the affo affordable care act, there s the central figure in the picture, much shorter than anyone else. he s marcellus owens. the senator from washington was the first person to tell the story of his life under the hold health care regime. i m going to tell everyone about this little boy. i met him at a health care rally in seattle. he was 10 years old. he and his two sisters have been through a lot. two years ago, his mother, tiffany, who is not in this picture, that s his grandmother,
0 but the president is being clear, no negotiating over congress s responsibility to pay the bills that congress has racked up. we won t negotiate over that. you talked about the habit i want to ask you, you talk about the habit that s been formed here and the need to break that habit. i wonder if you think the president and the white house bear some responsibility for the habit because back in 2011 when the house republicans first threatened essentially default in the process of trying to get leverage for a budget deal, the president was willing to negotiate. did that set a negative precedent that we re now living with to this day? there s no question, chris, that of the 40 plus times that congress has voted to raise the debt ceiling, the singular exception to how they approached it was 2011 and that for the first time in our history, one party, in this case the republicans, chose to actually flirt with default and that had negative consequences and were the first to acknowledge
the senator from iowa, i want to hear what he s saying. never mind, we got that audio coming from the rally. you see some senators there with tom harkin. kate, sorry i interrupted. but go ahead and pick up your authority. not a problem at all. as you and our colleagues have been skus idiscussing, there wa confusion early on. that it was not upheld under the commerce clause but could be upheld under the taxing provision. it sums up the thinking of the court in why they allowed this individual mandate in the law to be upheld. it says, and this is the opinion written by chief justice john roberts, it says the federal government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance. the federal government does, he goes on to say, have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. therefore, the individual mandate is therefore constitutional because it can be reasonably read as a tax. there is probably the most clear language we ve seen so far from the c
based on the commerce clause of the constitution. but it was upheld based on the tax writing provisions of the u.s. congress, and the executive branch of the u.s. government. a 5-4 decision. the key decision by the chief justice of the united states, john roberts. he sided with the other, the democratic appointed members of the supreme court, breyer, ginsberg, kagan, sotomayor, together with chief justice john roberts, they were in the majority. kennedy, scalia, alito and thomas, they were in the minority. the health care reform law stays in full fully remains the law of the land in the united states. kate baldwin has been watching all of this unfold. kate, you re outside the supreme court. give us some more on what was going on inside the supreme court. reporter: what was going on inside the supreme court is the chief justice, he announced the ruling and began reading part, a summary, really, of the opinion, the majority of opinion of the court. and that has been happeni